Month: June 2002

Phillis D. Brandon writes about Kerry McCoy for the High Profile section in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. Brandon interviews Mrs. McCoy, employees, and family on the past 28 years in the flag business. The following are excerpts from the two page article.

McCoy wound up in selling flags as a kind of last resort. She’d had a difficult time at North Little Rock’s Northeast High School, where “I was probably voted least likely to succeed.” It would be years before she was diagnosed with dyslexia, which impaired her reading skills. All the while, she was working after-school jobs at Woody’s Catering Service, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Park Theater.

McCoy’s mother says she recently read a definition of a chance taker:”It’s one who jumps over the cliff and builds her wings on the way down. I said, “That’s Kerry – she takes chances and I’m just the opposite.’Her business started with nothing and she has kept it going.”

By 1990, the flag industry was becoming computerized and McCoy’s business would change dramatically. “People used to come to me for hand-painted banners or sewn banners,” she says. “Now, they were going to Fast Signs and having banners digitally cut. So I quickly went to Dallas and bought that machine and started learning how to do computer-cut vinyl banners.”

Fisher, who joined Arkansas Flag and Banner in 1989, heads the firm’s accounting department. “I could not have done it without him,”McCoy says. “In the early days,” says Fisher,”we both did everything, sold traveled, did what we had to do. She is a dynamic individual, always thinking. I am the conservative, she is the outgoing one, and she never quits thinking. She’s always trying to improve this company and on the the next project.”

“I love the whole business thing,” McCoy says.” I like the strategy. I’m selling now down in the showroom. For the last three months I’ve been rotating among departments, even down in shipping, just to see what makes people keep ordering from me.”